Mentis Fugit - two minds, half a brain

Irredeemably Lightweight

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Fox mantra

Since my car's CD player died I've been reduced to grubbing through dusty boxes of old cassette tapes for my entertainment on the move. In the player now is a C-90 I ripped (yeah, yeah, we didn't call it that back then, did we?) a couple of Depeche Mode albums to. Side A "Some Great Reward", Side B "Black Celebration". So I get to the end of the second side, and there's the closing track, New Dress, from 1986.

The whole song is as relevant now as it was twenty years ago, but the chorus could serve as Rupert Murdoch's mission statement:

You can't change the worldBut you can change the factsAnd when you change the factsYou change points of viewIf you change points of viewYou may change a voteAnd when you change a voteYou may change the world

DRM, which allows copyright holders to control how customers access content, could lead to new pricing models favorable to consumers, said James DeLong, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), a conservative think tank. For example, instead of paying $30 for a new book, consumers may soon be able to pay $3 for a digital copy that lets them read it once, he said.

That would be the book that I can get from my public library for, uh, nothing? And read anywhere over the next three weeks? (Though if it's a new release I might have to pay, say, three dollars to have it for a week.)

Then there's the question of what "read it once" means. Can you flick back a couple of pages to refresh your memory of what Myrtle Knibb said to the butler when she found the razor blades in the guacamole? Silliness.

There was a time when booksellers tried to shut down libraries, in the 18th Century. We haven't come far at all.